Historically business users with a need for precision earth imagery must contract local aerial fliers to capture and process the area of interest. This method of imagery acquisition and delivery is termed Contract-Buy.
The business user contracting the Contract-Buy of acquisition and delivery of imagery owns the resulting product but also bears the full cost of flight, planning etc. They are also subject to long lead times, as the flight needs to be planned around seasonsal weather conditions. In this case, purchaser and provider must jointly review the map coverage of the purchaser's area of interest. This requires the purchaser and provider physically be in the same place at the same time in order to review maps and flight plans. This is necessary to ensure that the flier acquires imagery of the exact desired area. Providers must establish a store-front square footage to support this sale.
With the availability of the internet and map applications, content providers or technology providers supporting content providers offer imagery purchasers the ability to understand what imagery is available by overlaying it on a mapping application. These systems are limited in that they offer viewing only, either of imagery or of availability of imagery based on meta data. They typically do not allow the user to select the imagery for purchase. In systems where the user may be prompted to select imagery, it is either catalog based or driven by constraints which require the user to select from some pre-defined grid structure where both the centerpoint of the area and the area is constrained, or the area is constrained to a fixed size, or lastly, the area is constrained to a fixed horizontal to vertical aspect ratio. These constraints limit the user in that they cannot acquire the actual geospatial area they desire. Catalog based systems not only constrain the user's area to a predefined location and size, they burden the user by requiring them to communicate their imagery needs in a form that is complex and foreign to them. Systems which constrain the user, preventing them from selecting their desired geospatial area, often result in the user having to specify a much larger geospatial area than they desire. This has the negative result of greater cost to the user as well as greater amounts of digital data to store and manage and, most importantly, increased laborious post processing in order to cut their desired area from the larger area provided.
Most prior art systems are further limited in that they do not take the user through the entire buy and fulfillment process. The user typically needs to fax the specified catalog number or call content provider's customer service personnel to facilitate a phone purchase. Upon receiving desired catalog number, the fulfiller must manually transcribe information to fulfill and deliver the order. Because of the complexity of communicating the data relating both to the geospatial area and to the imagery, this manual process is at risk for errors. Existing systems are also limited in that they typically may allow for presentation of one content but not of multiple content from multiple suppliers.
E-commerce engines in the market place today require loading of a catalog database with Store Keeping Units (SKU #'s) or catalog numbers. Therefore, content providers or technology providers serving content providers that may seek to offer the ability to purchase on-line need to require the customer to communicate their purchase in unfamiliar catalog numbers when using commercially available software.
The present invention provides a method and system that overcomes limitations of such prior art systems by allowing the user to locate a geographical area and select a desired geospatial area for imagery regardless of center point location, size, shape or complex catalog numbers. It allows users to complete the entire purchase on-line without extra steps of faxing or calling customer service. It removes unnecessary manual steps in fulfillment, such as transcribing lengthy catalog numbers and other information about the user's order. It makes use of a customized e-commerce system that can support the entire end-to-end earth imagery purchase process.